What is a DOI? Just the basics

November 16, 2010

Most of the students (and some of the faculty) I work with have no idea what a DOI is or why they should care. This is what I tell them.

A DOI – Digital Object Identifier – is like a social security number for a journal article. They can be applied to other digital items as well, but you are most likely to encounter them in scholarly articles.

A DOI normally consists of numbers, letters and other punctuation. It will look like this:

10.1016/j.acthis.2007.10.006

10.1186/1475-2875-9-284

The DOI provides a way to permanently find a particular item. Publishers and scholarly societies change their websites all the time. Recently, a major publisher completely re-did their website, messing up all links into their site. I was quite annoyed. But the DOI could still link you to an article in a way that a URL couldn’t.

Incidentally, you can use the DOI to create a nice, neat compact URL for a journal article (instead of those really log URLs provided by some databases). You just need to add a little bit to the front of the DOI: